If Anything Happens I Love You: What Parents Need to Know About Talking About Scary Feelings With Kids
It’s 9:17 p.m., my 11-year-old’s backpack is dumped by the front door, my half-empty mug of lukewarm peppermint tea is sweating on the coffee table, and I just finished watching If Anything Happens I Love You with puffy red eyes and a crumpled paper towel in my hand. I clicked it on a whim while waiting for my laundry to finish drying, after seeing a handful of other mom creators talk about it on my Instagram feed. I knew it was about grieving parents after a school shooting, knew it would be hard, and I still thought I’d be fine. I wasn’t.
Last month, my son came home from his first semester of middle school, tossed his hoodie on the kitchen counter, and said they’d run a lockdown drill that day. I was stirring pasta for dinner, I nodded and asked if he was okay. He shrugged and said it was fine, they just sat in the back of the classroom closet for 20 minutes. I dropped it. I didn’t push. What was I supposed to say? I didn’t want to scare him more than the drill already had. I finished stirring the pasta, set the table, asked about his math test, and acted like nothing big had happened. That’s what we do, right? We wrap up the hard stuff and tuck it away, to keep our kids feeling safe.
The short film is almost entirely wordless, so it lets you sit with the quiet stuff no one talks about. It shows two parents going through their days, both of them hiding their grief over their daughter, walking around each other’s pain like it’s a broken glass on the floor—don’t touch it, don’t move it, just pretend it’s not there. That’s what hit me. I realized I do that all the time, not just with big grief like the film shows, but with all the small, scary, messy stuff that comes up now. I hide my hard feelings to protect my kid, and in doing that, I teach him to hide his.
After the credits rolled, I wiped my face and walked down the hall to my son’s bedroom. I could hear the faint hum of his Switch through the door, so I knew he wasn’t asleep yet. I knocked, he mumbled come in, and I sat on the edge of his unmade bed, where he had a pile of dirty soccer socks in the corner and a poster of his favorite gamer taped crookedly to the wall. I didn’t plan what I’d say, so I just said it: “I just watched a really sad short movie about kids and school, and it made me think of that lockdown drill you had a few weeks ago. When you told me about it, I didn’t say anything, but I went in the pantry after you went upstairs that night and cried. I was really scared.”
He paused his game, looked up at me, and didn’t shrug for the first time that whole month. He said, “I was scared too. I didn’t want to tell you. You seemed really busy, and I didn’t want to make you sad.”
That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re a new parent. We spend so much time worrying about burdening our kids with our feelings that we end up carrying all the weight alone, and they do too. I used to work as an after-school teacher for elementary kids before I stayed home, and I saw this play out every week. After a class pet died, all the kids would act out for days—pushing each other, yelling over snack, refusing to clean up—and no one could figure out why. It was always because the adults were walking around it, saying “it’s just a fish, we’ll get a new one” instead of stopping and saying “I’m really sad that Gary the Goldfish died, aren’t you?” Once someone said it out loud, all that tension just leaked out. Kids don’t need you to fix everything right away. They just need to know it’s okay to feel the thing they’re already feeling.
I’ve put together small, doable things I do now that came out of that night, that don’t take any extra time or special training. Instead of opening with “how do you feel about that?” which almost always gets a shrug, I start with how I feel. “I felt really frustrated when the soccer coach canceled practice last minute, that was such a bummer.” That takes the pressure off them to have a certain feeling, and it lets them meet you where they are. If they want to talk, they will. If not, they just nod and go back to what they’re doing, and you’ve already planted the seed that hard feelings can be talked about.
The other thing I do now is I don’t rush to fix the feeling. If my son says he was scared, I don’t jump in with “it’s just a drill, nothing bad is going to happen” to make the feeling go away. I just say “that’s such a heavy feeling to carry, isn’t it?” That’s it. I don’t need to fix it. Most of the time, bad things don’t have fixes, especially the big scary stuff like school violence or illness or grief. All you can do is be there with the feeling.
After we talked that night, my son went right back to his game. We didn’t have a big long hug or a dramatic moment where everything felt fixed. I got up, went back to the laundry room to get my dry clothes, and that was that. Before I closed the door, though, he said “thanks for telling me that, mom.”
I’m sitting back on the couch now, laundry folded, tea stone cold. I still don’t know how to keep my kid safe in a world where we have to talk about lockdown drills. I still avoid hard conversations sometimes, because they’re uncomfortable, because I don’t have answers. But I know now that hiding my feelings doesn’t keep him safe. It just keeps us both alone in the quiet with the things that scare us. That short movie didn’t fix anything for me, but it reminded me that the easiest way to make a scary feeling smaller is just to say it out loud. Some days, that’s all you can do, and that’s enough.
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